The Film Noir Experience

You may have seen this post on the Newsweek blog or the Metafilter thread that inspired it, but in case you haven’t you should.

A guy found out some friends of his had come from Russia with the promise of work only to have the work fall through at the last minute. They were then told to go from D.C. (where the work was supposed to be) to New York City to meet with a new potential employer at midnight about hostessing jobs. Thinking this sounded fishy and like his friends may have found themselves in a human trafficking situation, but not being in D.C. to help, he turned to the internet, to MetaFilter, to ask for assistance. While things aren’t completely settled yet, the women are still safely in New York with someone who read about the situation on MetaFilter and offered to help.

You read a lot of stuff about people meeting on the internet and things ending badly, kidnapping, pedophile, etc. It is nice to see a situation where the internet was used in order to keep people out of a dangerous situation. It is also nice to see someone reaching out for help and other people being there to answer.

So, for a good long while I was following Neil Gaiman on Twitter and so I was aware of this “Amanda Palmer” person to which he is apparently engaged. But aside for this fact, that she is engaged to Neil Gaiman, and that she was/is part of the Dresden Dolls, I didn’t know anything about her.

Eventually, I started following her on twitter, too, because I felt like I was missing halves of whole conversations. (And, I was.) So, still knowing nothing about her other than she is a musician of some kind and is engaged to Neil Gaiman I started reading her tweets.

And, don’t we live in an odd world when it is totally normal to read text message sized “blog posts” from complete and utter strangers.

I’ve come to the conclusion that she is amazing and I love her music. I recently downloaded “Do You Swear to the Tell the Truth the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth So Help Your Black Ass”. And, it just made me smile. The whole song is just so full of joy and happiness and true things that should probably be said out loud more often. Truths like, “yes i come here often/sure i’ll have another one/but i don’t have to talk to you” and “and i’ve already spent too much time/doing things i didn’t want to/so if i wanna sit here and write and drink wine/you can bet your black ass that i’m going to.”

But, I think my favorite part of the whole song is that its piano, guitar, ukele, and trombone under her vocals. How crazy is that? How awesome is that? But, as you know, I enjoy odd combinations.

Album: DO YOU SWEAR TO TELL THE TRUTH THE WHOLE TRUTH
AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH SO HELP YOUR BLACK ASS
Artist: Amanda Palmer
Song:DO YOU SWEAR TO TELL THE TRUTH THE WHOLE TRUTH
AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH SO HELP YOUR BLACK ASS

So, I’m teaching a class on the Roots of English. Today, we looked at the morphology of English. One of the books I’m using is English Vocabulary Elements. And, at some point in the book it mentions that the morpheme “phile” in “bibliophile” and “pedophile” both mean “love”. They come from the same place. But, the words take that meaning in different directions. People who are bibliophiles really enjoy books. They love them. People who are pedophiles…well, they really enjoy children; they love them. *shiver*. They just love them in a way that is illegal and, in my humble opinion, wrong (and more than a little gross.)

And, this made me think. “phil” is a root we get from Greek, and I thought it meant a “brotherly sort of love”. The kind of love that is romantic is “eros”, where we get our word for “erotic”. So, shouldn’t “pedophile” be “pedoerotic” or “eroped” or something like that?

Elements of vocabulary…English Vocabulary.